a better story - a biblical VISION for sex and marriage

This paper by Prof. Glynn Harrison is based on a lecture given at the recent annual conference of the Christian Medical Fellowship. It provides a highly thoughtful analysis of our contemporary culture with regard to its position on human sexuality, identifies the challenges facing the church and outlines the narrative that orthodox evangelicals need to inhabit, develop and share.

Until recently biblical sexual ethics had for centuries played a central role in the formation of social attitudes to sex, marriage and family. In less than a generation, however, the Christian moral vision - that human beings flourish when sexual interests are boundaried in life-long covenant between a man and a woman – has seen a profound loss of cultural power. Across Western Europe and the US, those who hold to traditional Christian sexual ethics not only find themselves on the wrong side of popular opinion, but allegedly on the ‘wrong side of history’ too.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for Christians with conservative views on sexual ethics to navigate the relationship between private and public spheres of faith. It is not my purpose however to address pressing issues of rights legislation, reasonable accommodation and freedom of religion here. Instead, I want to take a step back to address the impact of the sexual revolution on evangelicalism itself. The reality is that traditional biblical ethics have not only lost cultural power in wider society, but are now seriously weakened within evangelical communities too.

The sociologist Peter Berger argued[1] that unless ‘cognitive minorities’ (those who hold views dissonant with wider society) take active steps to sustain their internal plausibility structures (the ideas and hidden social interactions that support their particular way of life), they are destined to implode. This, I believe, is what is happening in many areas of modern evangelicalism.

Evangelical leaders seem poorly equipped to deal with the complex ethical, biological and social questions inherent in conversations about marriage and human sexuality. Despite their tradition of ‘Christian mind’, with some notable exceptions, they have displayed little serious academic engagement with these areas. Most important of all, fear of the new public shame culture seems to have silenced many and, in some parts of the Church, the shepherds have elected to referee, rather than to lead, their sheep.

This does not bode well for the future. Without a vision the people perish. So in this brief article I want to ask what needs to be done by evangelicals, for evangelicals. What must be done to stem if not reverse this tide? Can we better understand the times we live in and work out together what we must do?